This invention pertains generally to balanced mixers, and particularly to a balanced mixer wherein pairs of diodes are arranged to form a subharmonic mixer.
In a typical radar receiver, it is desirable to reduce any undesirable effect of spurious signals by the use of appropriate line filters to selectively attentuate any spurious signals. Such circuitry increases the complexity of the receiver and decreases receiver performance. As technology improves, radar signals at higher and higher frequencies are possible. At higher frequencies, component insertion losses increase and components of any known type of mixer used at higher frequencies have a greater effect in limiting the sensitivity of the receiver. It is, therefore, desirable to provide a mixer with inherent filtering properties, such mixer being capable of suppressing spurious and image signals, having a low conversion loss and being physically simpler than typical mixers.